On guns, Trump meets his Kryptonite

Updated 5:57 pm, Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Donald Trump says he can easily solves most problems, but when it comes to guns he is as passive as the rest of the GOP presidential field.

Donald Trump says he can easily solves most problems, but when it comes to guns he is as passive as the rest of the GOP presidential field.

Photo: Steven Senne /Associated Press

On guns, Trump meets his Kryptonite

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To Donald Trump, there is no American problem that bravado cannot solve.

Except maybe one.

Want to dismantle the 14th Amendment? Armed only with fire-breathing bluster, Trump will git ’er done.

Want 6 percent economic growth? Trump will make it happen.

Want to bring home jobs long ago outsourced to China and Mexico? Trump will show our trading partners and greedy U.S. multinationals who’s boss.

Want to defy the laws of arithmetic, causing a $10 trillion budget hole to disappear? Trump can will it so.

Want to round up 11 million undocumented workers, mass-deport them, then expediently let the “good ones” back in, all on the cheap? Call in your favorite negotiator.

Same with a “big, beautiful” wall on the southern border, and health care for all, and tax cuts for all, and everything else the generous Tax Cut Santa and Spending Santa can devise, all without nicking federal budgets.

Trump once compared himself to Batman, but in truth he more closely resembles the Man of Steel. And he knows it.

Last week, CNBC’s John Harwood said to Trump, “Your answer to policy questions, how do you pay for this, how are you going to do that, is: ‘I’m Trump. I’m good. I’m the best. I will get it done.’ Who’s your model? We don’t have Superman presidents.” The Republican front-runner replied: “No, but we will if you have Trump.” Thus spake Zarathustra.

A few days earlier, Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” told Trump, “You know, the problem with a lot of these ideas is that the president of the United States is not the CEO of America. … The Constitution is going to tell you no.” Trump’s response? “We’ll see.”

A Trump presidency would be all-powerful, one unconstrained by ideological adversaries, other sovereign nations, constitutional restrictions, political correctness or special interests. It offers the kind of tyrannical flourishes that right-wingers see in President Barack Obama, even though Obama has been blocked at every turn. President Trump has made it clear he would never tolerate such bullying.

Except, it seems, when it comes to one issue: gun violence. On this issue, Trump is — like every other Republican contender — strangely passive.

On “Meet the Press” Sunday, Trump explained there was no sense in even tinkering with gun laws. “You know, no matter what you do, guns, no guns, it doesn’t matter. You have people that are mentally ill. And they’re gonna come through the cracks,” he told Chuck Todd.

His comments on “This Week” were similarly fatalistic. “No matter what you do, you will have problems, and that’s the way the world goes.”

When host George Stephanopoulos noted how uncharacteristically can’t-do this attitude was, Trump said: “Now, George, I could say, oh, we’re going to do this and that and it’s never going to happen again. You have sick people in this country and throughout the world, and you’re always going to have difficulty.”

Taking a page out of the National Rifle Association’s playbook, Trump laid responsibility for gun violence at the feet of the mentally ill. But he abstained from advocating for more screening and services for mental illness.

Trump, like politicians he claims to disdain, shrugged. Trump, who prides himself on speaking the politically incorrect truth, dared not offend his base. Trump, who sees himself unrestrained by special interests, paid obeisance to the most powerful special interest in the country, the gun lobby. Trump, the self-proclaimed strongman, is now impotent.

This is a shame. Unlike economic stagnation, outsourcing or budgetary arithmetic, gun violence could be addressed by concrete, workable policy solutions. All that’s required is some Trumpian backbone.

We know what could be done to reduce would-be murderers’ access to weapons, including universal background checks and closure of the loophole that allowed Dylan Roof to purchase a gun. We could limit the size of magazines or reinstate the assault weapons ban. Or create a gun buyback program, as proved successful in Australia.

When it comes to curbing gun violence, the United States suffers not from a failure of imagination; we have a failure of will.